The US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project has announced three leadership staff changes within the Hardware and Integration (HI) group.
Over the past several months, ECP’s HI team has been adapting its organizational structure and key personnel to prepare for the next phase of exascale hardware and software integration.
Haritha Siddabathuni Som of Argonne National Laboratory has been selected as the lead of the Facility Resource Utilization (FRU) subproject for HI. She will formally assume her ECP role on March 2nd. In this position Som will manage ECP’s user program, through which requests from ECP teams are awarded time at DOE’s leadership computing facilities on a quarterly basis. She will be the host of the ECP Resource Allocation Council (RAC) monthly calls and will be coordinating ECP’s requests for allocations.
Currently Som is the team lead at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) user experience team and will retain this role for the ALCF even after starting her new role with the ECP. Before starting at Argonne, she worked for the University of Illinois at Chicago in IT management. She has an M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Haritha Siddabathuni Som from Argonne National Laboratory
Haritha replaces Julia White of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who in addition to her role as ECP’s technical operations manager has taken over the responsibilities of ECP risk manager.
We are extremely pleased to have Haritha Siddabathuni Som join us in this lead position with the HI team,” said Terri Quinn, ECP director of Hardware and Integration and associate program director for Livermore Computing (LC), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) high-performance computing organization. “She comes to the ECP with a great combination of experience with DOE user programs and running a customer service organization for the ALCF. The ECP leadership has found it is a great advantage for the HI leaders to hold dual leadership roles, one for ECP and one at their Lab’s computing facility, since HI partners with the DOE computing facilities. And I want to extend our special thanks to Julia White for so admirably designing, implementing, and shepherding ECP’s user program. This program was her creation and she designed it to conform to the special needs of ECP and our partners at the DOE Facilities.”
Scott Pakin from LANL
Scott Pakin of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is already up to speed with the ECP, having joined the HI team late last year. He leads HI’s Hardware Evaluation project. This project provides ECP and DOE Facilities with hardware modeling and simulation capabilities and specialized hardware analyses. The project’s goal is to guide application development on hardware advances and to identify hardware technologies that offer the greatest benefit to ECP applications. Hardware Evaluation is staffed by a multi-lab team of DOE hardware experts.
As a research scientist on LANL’s Programming Models team, Pakin works on quantum computing, among other topics. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are high-performance computer systems, with an emphasis on high-speed communication networks, messaging layers, parallel programming models, and quantum computing.
Scott Pakin has already established himself as a valuable addition to the HI team,” said Susan Coghlan, the ECP deputy director for HI and the deputy division director at the ALCF. “He is a respected researcher within the hardware research community and has ably guided his team, demonstrating great collaboration skills in establishing the group’s next set of research priorities from among a number of competing interests.”
The previous lead for Hardware and Evaluation was Si Hammond of Sandia National Laboratories, who left his ECP role to pursue other interests. “Si Hammond made several key contributions during his tenure as the Hardware Evaluation lead,” said Coghlan. “He guided the Hardware and Evaluation team through a difficult period, which was to align the team with ECP’s changing
Ryan Adamson, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Ryan Adamson of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory also joined the HI team late last year. He leads HI’s Software Deployment project. The Software Deployment project works closely with the DOE HPC facilities to deploy and integrate the appropriate ECP software stack to meet the needs of their users.
This project is deploying a software build and deployment capability for DOE HPC systems, including a continuous integration service. The goal is to make these capabilities available across the DOE HPC sites for DOE software developers and HPC users leading to greater adoption and higher-quality software.
Ryan is the lead for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF) HPC Core Operations group. Previously, he was a Senior Security Engineer at the OLCF. Adamson received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee. His professional interests center on HPC security, data pipelines, and using technology, and he develops best practices to help organizations scale as their complexity grows.
“Ryan has quickly adapted to his role with the ECP and taken charge of this complicated project,” Quinn said. “It is clear his HPC systems experience and his talents are serving him and the project well. He brings a thoughtful and considered approach to this role and we are fortunate to have him on the team.”
The previous lead for Software Deployment was Dave Montoya of LANL, who retired. “Dave Montoya was outstanding as the first leader of the Software Deployment project,” Quinn said. “Like Julia White and Si Hammond, Dave was given the task of creating his project from the ground up. Dave’s challenge was to build a consensus among six DOE labs on the approach and the goals for this project. Dave succeeded due to his vast knowledge and experience in HPC software process and his collaborative nature.”
